photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod speaks at the FBI and KU Cybersecurity Conference on April 4, 2025.

Chancellor Douglas Girod said he decided to conduct an internal-only search for the university’s next provost because KU is in such a critical moment of development that it can’t afford to “hit the pause button”.

The provost/executive vice chancellor position is the second-highest ranking executive on KU’s Lawrence campus, and is the chief academic officer for the university. Despite its broad importance, Girod said Thursday that he was comfortable to confining the search to candidates who are already part of the KU organization.

In fact, he said he thinks such familiarity is critical in this moment.

“My thinking on the internal search is we want people who already know who we are, what we we are doing, and how we are doing it so that we don’t lose momentum,” Girod said in a brief interview with the Journal-World.

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Barbara Bichelmeyer announced on Tuesday that she would be resigning both positions, but intends to stay with the University of Kansas in a faculty position. Bichelmeyer has agreed to remain in the position until a replacement is found. Girod has said he expects to have a new provost in place by the spring 2026 semester, which begins in January.

The university is in the midst of several new strategies — ranging from recruiting to student advising — that has helped produce two consecutive years of record enrollments. Less visible, the university is undergoing a complete reorganization of its executive branch — called One KU — that has rearranged duties of top officers and sought to bring the Lawrence campus and the medical school in Kansas City closer together.

Girod said those projects and others played into his thinking to forgo a nationwide search for the position. However, Girod said he was confident the internal search would be robust and would produce multiple candidates.

“We have a ton of talent on this campus,” Girod said.

Bichelmeyer, who has been in the provost/executive vice chancellor role for the last six years, provided a few more details about her future plans during a meeting with members of the Kansas Board of Regents, who were touring the Lawrence campus on Thursday.

Bichelmeyer said she expects to spend significant time in KU’s School of Professional Studies, which is largely based at the Edwards Campus in Johnson County. The School of Professional Studies is one of the divisions of KU that offers a new type of classes that is not based on a traditional semester system, but rather move at the pace of each student. As a student masters a set of competencies, they get to move onto the next section of the program, regardless of the amount of time they have spent in the class.

The concept, called competency-based education, is a major strategy for KU to grow its enrollment by serving non-traditional students and others who don’t want to be tied to a traditional semester, credit-hour-based system. Bichelmeyer said she has been involved in designing a specific CBE program for the school, and will work to implement it when she returns to the faculty, among other projects.

The competency-based education program also is expected to be a strategy for KU to increase revenue by offering distance and remote learning to a larger audience. Bichelmeyer said she will be looking at those type of opportunities in her new role.

“In my conversation with the chancellor I said I think I can be more productive in serving some of these goals by stepping out of my role,” Bichelmeyer told the regents.

She said plans to do “seeding” work for the competency-based education program, and be on the lookout for ways the strategy can boost the university’s finances.

“We have got to generate revenue in order for us to do what we need to do,” Bichelmeyer said.

Girod said he’s pleased to have Bichelmeyer working on ways for KU to innovate on new educational models, which he said KU must be “quicker” to act on in the future. As for the next provost, Girod said it will be important for the person to be able to follow through and complete the many programs that are underway, and also be prepared to adapt to potentially changing realities in how the federal government funds university research.

“We don’t even know what that looks like right now,” Girod said.